The Lead Yourself First Blog

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Ignite Excellence Conference in Toronto.  Suzanne F. Stevens, the founder of the Ignite Excellence Foundation, inspired 150 people to attend the event and support her vision of raising funds for African Leaders of Tomorrow. With an incredible line-up of speakers, entertainers and suppliers who […]

“Who” a leader and “what” is leadership? There are many business books on the theory of leadership and the various models that evolved over the past fifty years regarding leadership in the traditional sense; i.e. being a leader meaning “the title”, generally associated with being in charge of others. A title on a business card […]

What is your experience of customer service? Why are we so surprised when we have a transformational customer service experience? Unfortunately, we usually experience transactional customer service to the point where it has become expected. Here is what happened to me on the way to a customer service speaking engagement earlier this week. At precisely […]

The border of New South Wales and Queensland, Australia I recently celebrated my 50th birthday. If you had asked me at the age of 40 where I would be at 50, I would not have had a clue that life would look this good today. Nor would I have known that my 40’s were going […]

What you need to know when booking a keynote conference speaker Making the decision to hire a professional speaker has become far more complex with the advent of the internet. For speakers, the notion of running their businesses without a website would be foolhardy to say the least. The #1 resource for finding a speaker […]

I’ve just returned from five weeks visiting family in Australia. When I told my Canadian friends I was going to be away, most were excited for me spending time in the Southern Hemisphere i.e. Summer “downunder”. They thought I was going to have a wonderful vacation. Being self-employed, I certainly felt fortunate to have the […]

How many times have you said to yourself “I will never do business with that company again”?  The reason you feel disgruntled has virtually nothing to do with the company. It has everything to do with the person you encounter at that moment. Client satisfaction levels are directly impacted by the attitude of the person […]

By Michelle Ray, “The Attitude Adjustor”, keynote speaker and workplace motivation expert The “R” word…Are we having one or not? No doubt, the statistical evidence leads us to conclude that the downturn has begun. Wherever we turn, the news since the Fall has been predictably bleak regarding the economy. This is nothing new; being fed […]

This is an article from a while back, I have it available for download on my site here: Motivation & Business Articles But in light of my new blog, I am going to add them to the blog so you don’t need to download it anymore! Enjoy the read! Daily Courier, Thursday, May 28, 2002 […]

Last week after working with two clients in very different arenas (education and accounting… union and non-union) I found myself thinking about the fact that people who love their jobs have several things in common. In both cases, the people from these two organizations are all in a support staff role yet they are polar […]